Law firms completed 41 mergers in 2021. The total was up slightly from 40 in 2020, but well below the historical average of 55 mergers per year over the previous decade. Despite the slow down, Indiana’s legal community still saw some combinations take place during the pandemic.
A merger of two plaintiffs’ firms in Indianapolis is reuniting two trial lawyers, Joseph Williams and James Piatt, with their mentor, Ron Waicukauski.
Months after its entry into the Indiana market, Dinsmore & Shohl has grown its Indianapolis office by 15% in recent weeks with the addition of six attorneys.
Crowell & Moring, an international law firm with more than 550 attorneys around the world, is entering the Indianapolis market through a merger with the boutique intellectual property law firm, Brinks Gilson & Lione.
Dentons has launched its combination with the Alabama law firm Sirote & Permutt, adding to the global giant’s Project Golden Spike initiative that is creating the “first truly national U.S. law firm.”
The Indiana Supreme Court on Thursday struck down lower court rulings in favor of an unpaid contractor that performed work for a South Bend business, finding that because the business’s assets are now owned by a bank rather than the prior company, the new bank-owned business is not liable for the bill.
With the merger of Indiana’s Wooden McLaughlin and Dinsmore Shohl leading the more than two dozen law firm combinations that were announced in the first quarter of 2021, the new year is expected to bring a return of robust consolidation activity in the legal market.
A small Indianapolis law firm that’s less than a decade old has grown again, this time building its staff by adding a veteran attorney to form a firm whose newest partner says is informally known around the office as “Mom and the boys.”
The global pandemic halted the skyrocketing law firm mergers of recent years. However, the forces driving these combinations in the past have continued despite the coronavirus outbreak and will likely ignite more deals if people are able to return to some sort of a pre-pandemic lifestyle.
Wooden McLaughlin LLP has joined Dinsmore & Shohl LLP in what is being described as one of the largest mergers between two domestic-only law firms during the COVID-19 pandemic. The combination, which was official Jan. 1, was announced by Dinsmore on Monday and brings three Indiana law offices under its umbrella.
Dentons’ Project Golden Spike initiative launched by the combination with the former Bingham Greenebaum Doll is preparing to roll through Alabama with plans to combine with Sirote & Permutt, a law firm with five locations in the state and 86 attorneys.
Dentons is continuing its Project Golden Spike, an initiative to create a national U.S. law firm, by announcing Tuesday a combination with Davis Brown, one of the largest law firms in Iowa.
With a portfolio of clients who innovate and launch small businesses, Gutwein Law realized many of these entrepreneurs had cute little startups waiting for them at home. What happened next was elementary: a lawyer and marketing pro at the firm produced “The ABCs of Entrepreneurship: A Book for the Future Startup Founder.”
Indianapolis-based Simon Property Group has negotiated a $656 million cut in the price it will pay to purchase a Michigan-based shopping center company in light of the pandemic — a deal that comes just in time to stop a trial that was set to start Monday.
Merger activity among law firms increased in the third quarter, according to a report by Altman Weil, but with just 44 deals announced so far this year, 2020 is mirroring the Great Recession rather than the explosive growth experienced in recent years.
A Delaware judge rebuffed efforts by both Cigna Corp. and Anthem Inc. to collect billions over their failed merger, saying Cigna had breached its obligations but the merger was likely to have been blocked on antitrust grounds anyway.
Dentons has announced a future combination with Salt Lake City-based Durham Jones & Pinegar, which is being billed as the largest law firm combination announced since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. The global legal giant announced the combination Tuesday as part of its strategy that also included its combination finalized earlier this year with the former Bingham Greenebaum Doll.
Although the pandemic has thrown ice water on the red-hot law firm merger market, combinations are still happening and Indiana, a state often absent from the list of merger activity, recorded two separate combinations just as the COVID-19 crisis was taking hold.
Indianapolis-based Simon Property Group Inc. on Wednesday morning announced it has called off its deal to acquire rival shopping center owner Taubman Centers Inc. for $3.6 billion.
The Chicago-based law firm of Kovitz Shifrin Nesbit now has an Indiana address with the completion of its acquisition of the Tanner Law Group, an Indianapolis firm that represented the largest number of community associations in the Hoosier state.